New cooker smell

I've got a new oven. Don't you love it when you turn them on for the first time and they melt the protective covering stuff on the elements and fill the house with poisonous toxic gases? It really takes me back to my short-lived student days when we also got a new cooker and were similarly gassed.

Smells are really good at triggering distant memories, as people always tell me. Seriously, people tell me that quite often. It's the kind of person who comes up to me and says "You're the memory man, aren't you?" and then follows it up with "I've always had a good memory myself..." and then tells me everything they know about the process of memory. I think they're expecting me to say "Yes, that's right, my goodness, you certainly are clever!" But the smell thing is always one of the first things they say. It's true, anyway, and I'm currently trying to formulate a way of cheating in memory competitions by smuggling scratch-and-sniff books into the room, disguised as rough notepaper.

Actually, now I come to think of it, I do say something like "Yes, that's right, my goodness, you certainly are clever!" in that kind of situation. So I've only got myself to blame if people keep doing this to me. Maybe I should just sneer contemptuously at them instead, but then I'm afraid that they might punch me in the nose and destroy my sense of smell, and with it my memory.